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The Wendell Berry Farming Program Preparing a New Generation of Farmers

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The Wendell Berry Farming Program Preparing a New Generation of Farmers The Wendell Berry Farming Program Preparing a New Generation of Farmers Published in 1977, Wendell Berry's seminal work, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, describes the peril facing rural ​ ​ communities. Among other issues, he discusses how higher learning institutions in this country approach farming through the lens of industrial agriculture rather than teaching nature-based, neighborly farming. Forty years after the publication of Unsettling we see how this miseducation has perpetuated economic, ecological, and social crises across rural America. The ​ Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College was created to respond to these crises and offer hope for the future of farming and rural communities. The Berry Center advocates for farmers, land conserving communities, and healthy local economies. Sterling College, a liberal arts college focusing on environmental stewardship, pioneered teaching sustainable agriculture, inspired by Wendell Berry and others. These two organizations have collaborated to establish an educational model that prepares a new generation of farmers to help reinvigorate rural communities. In 2019, Sterling College will launch the Wendell Berry Farming Program based on the lifework and writing of Wendell Berry. The program will draw upon the College’s contributions to the agricultural movement in Vermont and, with the expertise and resources of The Berry Center, we will establish a new site for undergraduate agricultural education in Henry County, Kentucky that will both prepare a new generation of farmers and will serve as an educational model for rural America. The Wendell Berry Farming Program will inspire the most comprehensive change in agricultural education since the advent of the land grant universities and one that addresses the failure of higher education to use nature as its measure in preparing the next generation of farmers. THE CHALLENGE We must have more farmers who understand how to build soil and communities. The complexity of our present trouble is clear. We have lost much of the local culture that passes knowledge and land from one generation to another. Today, only sixteen percent of Americans live in rural places, leaving the future of thousands of communities in continued peril. With fewer than one percent of us farming and the average age of an American farmer nearing sixty, it is critical that society educate a generation of students to farm, to dig in, make a home, and build strong rural communities. “The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.” Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear” Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, published in 1977, awakened a national conversation about the ​ ​ dire state of agriculture. He shed a light on the dismal state of agricultural education - or, rather, miseducation. Our land grant universities have for generations promoted miseducation in industrial agriculture that erodes the environment and local economies, just as American higher education focused on upward mobility and migration away from rural communities. Without a new concept of education that includes farming at its center, we will be unable to foster a healthy food system across our nation. 1 PREPARING A NEW GENERATION OF FARMERS The Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College will educate this new generation of farmers in agrarian thought and practices that are holistic and place-based. We will put into practice our ideal for an agricultural education that brings farmers “home” by facilitating and supporting their transition to farming using the financial assets of the Wendell Berry Farming Program endowment. Our Partnership Sterling has been working for decades to change the American concept of education. Inspiration has come over those decades from the writing of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and the publication of the Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. The ​ ​ partnership between The Berry Center and Sterling College links two organizations that have long shared a vision of a different kind of agricultural education. “At the core of Sterling is the concern for the relationship between man and his environment. No more critical issue faces society today, and it has become very clear that neither the narrow technician nor the uninformed idealist can reach a solution alone. Sterling provides a comprehensive bridge between thought and deed as its students confront the questions that affect the future of us all.” Sterling College publication, 1978 Together, in Henry County, Kentucky, beginning in September 2019, The Berry Center and Sterling College will launch a place-based education for fifty undergraduate students who aspire to farm and who share a deep understanding that nature must be the standard for work and production. This partnership will allow us to extend the reach of our organizational missions. Each partner brings unique strengths and attributes that form a singular, new farmer education that exists nowhere else. The Berry Center was launched in 2011 to foster a conversation and to preserve the legacy of Wendell Berry’s work and writing. The Center advocates for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy local economies. It seeks to provide solutions to essential issues that are rarely in public discourse and certainly are not reflected in agricultural policies. The Center was seeking an educational partner to help address what it will take for farmers to be able to afford to farm well and to determine how a culture can support good farming and land use. After an exhaustive review of hundreds of programs and potential educational partners, The Berry Center chose to collaborate with Sterling. Sterling College is an accredited liberal arts college with a long-standing place-based experiential model of education. It was one of the very first colleges in the United States to focus on sustainable agriculture and has had a campus farm since 1965. Using nature as its standard, Sterling has reached full enrollment with 130 students studying in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, but it also sees the urgent need to increase access to its unique educational mission. Recognizing that our graduates aspire to live in rural places and to be land stewards who strengthen their communities, the opportunity to partner with The Berry Center represents a chance for a small college to leverage its resources and mission to scale out, without having to scale up. New Farmer Education Sterling College has a deep commitment to Wendell Berry’s idea that a college should make “succinct and tangible connections between education and communities and the land.” Drawing on the resources of both organizations, the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College will introduce undergraduate students to renowned agrarian thinkers and leaders, including Kentucky farmers, businesses, and organizations. The curriculum will serve students from generational farming families and those from families that have not farmed for generations. The common characteristic shared by our students will be a strong desire for an education that prepares them to come “home” to farm and build strong rural communities. 2 “Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve - both the living community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit. To educate is, literally, to ‘bring up,’ to bring young people to a responsible maturity, to help them to be good caretakers of what they have been given, to help them to be charitable toward fellow creatures . And if this education is to be well used, it is obvious that it must be used somewhere; it must be used where one lives, where one intends to continue to live; it must be brought home.” Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” The Wendell Berry Farming Program will be designed for students in their third and fourth - junior and senior - years of college. Our students will be interested in a different kind of agricultural education, one that is based in the liberal arts, is experientially oriented, and is inspired by Wendell Berry and the litany of people who have influenced him. The curriculum will be offered by Sterling faculty who make their homes in Kentucky. With its agricultural emphasis, the academic year will begin in the summer and typically take a student four semesters to complete, leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sustainable Agriculture from Sterling College. Select Academic Courses in the Wendell Berry Farming Program: Homecoming: Good Work is Membership Farm Business Management Readings in Agriculture I & II Comparative Agriculture Changes in Place: Agrarian & Natural History Restoration Forestry Draft Power Practicum I & II Best Management Practices for Crop Production Community Food System Development Best Management Practices for Livestock Production Farming is hard work, and we will attract students for whom the idea of work and stewardship are compelling. Sterling College is one of only nine colleges in the United States to be recognized by the federal government as a work college and to be a member of the Work Colleges Consortium. Sterling emphasizes the value of work and responsibility as key attributes to being a good community member. All students in the Wendell Berry Farming Program will partially support the cost of their education through their own labor. Our vision of farmer education focuses on preparing graduates who wish to serve the rural communities in which they will build their lives and are well prepared to do so. They will contribute to building a just food system by farming with nature as the measure. We know that Sterling College has had such an impact in Vermont. We believe the need is clear for something similar to happen in Henry County, Kentucky - Wendell and Tanya Berry’s home community and home of The Berry Center.
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